Friday 31 January 2020—The Run Up to Dubai, United Arab Emirates

We have been at sea until yesterday since we last checked in with our friends on 24 January. Then we set out from the port at Aqaba in Jordan. You might think six consecutive days at sea would be boring—and it certainly has that potential. Yet at least two things helped us keep our sanity and helped us avoid tedium. The first was the fact that the Australian Tennis tournament was on our limited television viewing list. We watched it some each day as it was being played in Melbourne. We will be arriving in Melbourne in about six weeks.

The other thing that garnered our interest and kept us from boredom was that we were traveling through the narrow Bab el Mandeb strait and then entered the Gulf of Aden. Thus, on one side of the ship we could at times see Somalia and on the other side see Yemen. This part of the world is a “high risk” area for piracy and includes the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. And although the shipping line people say the risk is low, they seem to treat it otherwise. It certainly raised the anxiety of many of the passengers. Somalia has long been a staging area for pirates. Neil even saw a Pirate cemetery when he lived in Madagascar and it purportedly accommodated the body of Bluebeard (Editor’s note: It may have been Redbeard, Blackbeard, or some other color beard). Our ship (more correctly, Rita Rice’s ship) was shadowed one afternoon by a British military cruiser. That persuaded me that someone was serious about Pirates!

Neil and I went into Dubai on Thursday and I don’t really know how to describe it. Everything seems very new and tall. There are hundreds of skyscrapers that are 50+ stories high. The Emirates Towers, the Burj Khalifa, the Palm Islands and the world’s second tallest, and most expensive hotel, the Burj Al Arab all dot the scenery of this extremely clean and impressive city of two million people.

We rode a bus around for a whole afternoon and soon realized we could not even hit the highlights of Dubai in under a week. All told, it was a very good day—and I got a haircut. Neil found his favorite fixation on the trip so far—a giant bookstore. I cannot remember ever seeing a larger bookstore. I think Austin’s Book People could have fit in this Dubai bookstore about ten times with room to spare.

Today is Muslim sabbath and we sail on to Oman this afternoon. I hope all is well in Texas and beyond for our friends.

From your friends,

Neil (the editor) and David